Hi, There is one very important reason for branches, and that is freezes. In the GNOME project we had exactly this same debate back in the day; lots of people did not want to branch, they wanted to keep the same version and rebuild it for multiple GNOME releases. The problem is that then people cheat on the freeze rules. The stable branch of GNOME was bugfixes only. So if you didn't branch, there was no way to do any development - you had to follow the most restrictive freeze for any release you might build into. Of course the people most annoyed by having to branch were also the people making the most changes and doing the most development. ;-) Fedora is a bit different, because we do allow package updates with new versions and new features, something GNOME does not allow. So it is more acceptable not to branch. Even for Fedora though there are a lot of changes that would be inappropriate in an already-released version of the OS. But consider that we're using the same build and CVS setup for RHEL, where branching is pretty much absolutely mandatory and we don't want to risk any changes to the stable branch unless they are *explicitly* backported. The original explanation of the GNOME rules is here: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2002-June/msg00041.html Perhaps it's interesting how things work today in GNOME: we allow maintainers to branch when they want, which is essentially "the first time they do a non-bugfix (want to break the freeze)" - but the branch name is standardized, and they have to mail the translators and docs teams that the branch has happened, and they can't put in freeze- violating changes until they branch. So I'm not advocating here that we need Fedora to work one way or another, I'm just pointing out that there's a problem with having all your development work automatically/implicitly affect already-released versions of the OS. Remember that the primary task of a distribution is integration, and that means the packages have to be tested as a set; you invalidate that integration work if you aren't thinking about what changes are reasonable in each version specifically. Again, Fedora does have a goal of keeping stuff as updated as possible, but I still think we want to think about whether a change is right for already-released versions rather than automatically having much of rawhide propagating back. It's also possible that Core and Extras are different in how they handle this stuff. Dunno, .02 Havoc
